WHAT WORLD'S PRESS HAS NOT
NOTICED Far
from being Hitler-worshipper, one of the
Colorado school-library killers was from a
wealthy family . . .

April 25, 1999

Students
Planned Attack for a Year, Diary
Reveals

By JAMES BROOKE

Rachell
Scott's coffin

LITTLETON,
Colo. -- The two young men who shot and
bombed their way through their high school
here planned the assault a year in
advance, monitored cafeteria crowds to
determine the busiest times and scheduled
their suicide attack for Hitler's
birthday, a law-enforcement official said
on Saturday, citing a handwritten
diary.

"It was 'Day 1, we do this, Day 2, do
this,' down to 11:15 and it's
rock-and-roll time," said
John Stone,
Jefferson County Sheriff, referring to the
precise moment on Tuesday that Eric
Harris and Dylan Klebold
[left and
right,
below]attacked their school.

He said that the diary began in April
1998, and was seized by the police at one
of the boys' homes after the shooting. He
did not say which young man kept the
diary.

"They were going for a big kill,"
Sheriff Stone said. The two young men had
been building bombs and acquiring weapons
"for a considerable time," he added.

The diary details how the writer mapped
out the school, noting lights and hiding
places, and established a system of hand
signals to use during the attack.

"The
bottom line of this thing is that they
wanted to do as much damage as they could
possibly do, and destroy the school and
destroy as many children as they could,
and go out in flames," Sheriff Stone said
of the attack, which resulted in the
deaths of 15 people, including the two
young men, who killed themselves.

The size of the arsenal that the young
men had in the school -- four guns and
about 30 explosive devices, including a
propane tank bomb, had led investigators
to believe they must have had help.

Sheriff Stone did not reveal any
evidence of such assistance, but said: "I
don't think it was just two guys acting
alone. If there was a third, fourth or
fifth person involved, we are going to
find them."

Sheriff Stone said investigators were
examining the two young men's phone and
Internet records.

Earlier on Saturday, Steve
Davis, the sheriff's spokesman,
stressed: "We still haven't named anyone
else as a suspect. There have not been any
arrests or charges filed against
anyone."

Peppered with German phrases, the diary
has "this German, Nazi theme to it," the
sheriff said. Asked why they picked April
20, he said, "They said it was Hitler's
birthday."

This obsession
with Nazism clashes with the roots of
one of the suspects, Dylan Klebold,
whose mother, Susan, is Jewish.
Klebold's grandfather, the late Leo
Yassenhoff, a wealthy commercial
real estate developer in Columbus,
Ohio, was a prominent philanthropist
who donated so much money to the Jewish
Community Center of Columbus that it
was named after him.

The sheriff also had the harshest
official words yet for the parents of the
diary writer.

Noting that detectives found a shotgun
barrel on one of the boys' bedroom
dressers and bomb-making materials and
weapons in the houses, he said: "A lot of
this stuff was clearly visible and the
parents should have known. I think parents
are accountable for their kid's
actions."

While the sheriff briefed reporters on
the crime, mourners flocked to the second
of more than a dozen services expected in
the coming days, the funeral of Rachel
Scott, a 17-year-old Columbine High School
student.

Before the funeral, students and family
members wrote messages on her white
casket. One, in black felt-tipped marker,
read, "Honey, you are everything a mother
could ever ask the Lord for in a daughter.
I love you so much!!! Mom."

At a memorial service on Friday for
another student, John Robert
Tomlin, a girl associated with the
loose group of students known as the
trench coat mafia stood before 900
mourners and apologized for the actions of
the two young men, also members of the
clique at Columbine.

"There was no sign that they would do
this," said the girl, Nicole
Makham. Addressing a church filled
with the family and friends of the
16-year-old Mr. Tomlin, she said, "We
would just like to say that we're sorry
for what they did."

Four days after the shooting, four
wounded girls and seven wounded boys
remained in hospitals, less than half of
the total of 23 who were hospitalized last
Tuesday. Of the hospitalized, two were
listed today as in critical condition, six
in serious, and three in fair.

The sheriff also said that his
department was assembling a detailed
timeline of the police response to the
attack on the high school. Responding to
criticism that the police reaction may
have been slow, he said that within 2
minutes of the first 911 calls, a deputy
sheriff assigned to the school was trading
gunfire with the attackers. Fifteen
minutes later, he said, the first SWAT
team entered the high school.

"Early intervention of that first SWAT
unit, I think saved one heck of a lot of
kids' lives, by pinning these guys down,
by putting them on the defensive, instead
of the offensive, and subsequently
probably led to their suicide," the
sheriff said.. Asking why television
viewers saw SWAT teams standing outside
the school for over an hour, he said, "We
didn't want to have one SWAT team shooting
another SWAT team."

As the investigation continues, a
picture emerges of a suburban world where
adults had only superficial understandings
of the lives of the two teen-age
suspects.

Only two months ago, the two graduated
with flying colors from a year long
court-ordered juvenile diversion program,
administered by the Jefferson County
Sheriff's Department. After completing the
program and anger management classes, they
had their records wiped clean. They had
pleaded guilty to breaking into a car last
year and stealing electronic
equipment.

To participate in this probation
program, the boys had signed contracts
stipulating that they would not acquire
firearms. However, according to the diary,
they had started secretly amassing
weapons, ammunition, and bomb-making
materials last year, Sheriff Stone
said.

Frank DeAngelis, the principal
of the 1,800-student high school, said on
Friday that no teacher had alerted him to
behavior problems in the suspects, both
seniors.

"I had never heard of the trench coat
mafia until Tuesday," the principal said,
although the group had a small photo in
the 1998 yearbook. In his first public
comments since the massacre, DeAngelis
said that school records indicated the two
young men had never been "suspended or
expelled or in big trouble."

Two parents of
Columbine High School students have
complained in recent days that members
of the trench coat mafia had threatened
to kill their sons. The family of a
black student killed Tuesday, Isaiah
Shoels, said that their son had
been threatened by the all-white gang
which affected Nazi trappings.

Randall Brown, whose son,
Brooks, was not injured on Tuesday, has
said that Eric Harris broke the
windshield of his son's car last year and
then posted this message on his Web site:
"If anyone wants to kill someone, why not
Brooks Brown?" Brown, a neighbor of the
Harris family, said that he complained to
the Jefferson County Sheriff's Department
that Eric was assembling and exploding
pipe bombs in the neighborhood and had
threatened his son. Brown said that his
complaints did not seem to produce any
action.

In recent days, as the electronic and
print media burned into the nation's
collective consciousness the images of
students fleeing mayhem at the high school
here, dozens of students around the nation
have been suspended and arrested for
threatening to carry out copycat attacks.
In big cities, small towns and suburbs
like this one, schools have been
evacuated. In Denver and other cities
around the country, school superintendents
have banned the wearing of black trench
coats to school.

In the most serious case, five junior
high school students in the central Texas
town of Wimberley were arrested Friday and
charged with conspiracy to commit murder,
conspiracy to commit arson, and conspiracy
to manufacture explosives.

Copyright
1999 The New York Times
Company

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